In my studio, the new year marks the beginning of composing season, during which each of my students will write at least one composition. A couple of my students typically will write one or more pieces on their own, but most of my students need some level of guidance and encouragement to get them from the beginning of the piece to the end. Some of my youngest students will take only a couple of lessons to complete a short piece. Usually at least one student hates everything he or she writes. In this case, the process reminds me of one of those made for TV movies I saw as a kid, where I am the farmer blindfolding the panicking horse so that I might lead it out of a burning barn. But most of my students enjoy the process and are quite proud of the end result.

I require my students to compose for several reasons:

• I am an active compose partly because one of my early piano teachers encouraged creativity beyond what was written on the page. I may not have pursued this passion if that door hadn’t been opened for me by that teacher. Hence, I believe it is important to crack this door open for every student, at least to offer a glimpse of one potential creative passion a student might embrace.
• I want my students to know that music is not written only by dead white men or far-away, glamorous rock stars. It can be written here and now, by anybody, including a five-year old beginning piano student.
• Writing music offers great opportunities to dive deeply into music analysis. My younger students write to conform to basic musical forms, while my older students analyze works that they have enjoyed playing and write music modeled after that.

Frequently I want to make a music worksheet that contains formatted text and music examples. You can do this with Sibelius, but I find it cumbersome. There is a way to do this with OpenOffice and LilyPond, but it is difficult to set up and, I found, subject to stop working on subsequent updates to OpenOffice. So, most of the time, I resort to exporting graphics from Sibelius into Microsoft Word documents. This means that my document data is scattered between multiple Sibelius files (assuming I save them) and one Microsoft Word document. Updating the document with new or edited music examples is not always easy.

Today I discovered a tool that allows you to edit and embed music directly within Google Docs (also known as Google Drive). This keeps the text and music within the same document, and they can be edited easily for future changes.

Six hours after sitting down to hammer out my next Songwriting Class assignment, my brain is tired, I’m very hungry, and I feel only marginally closer to my goal. I suspect that if someone else were around, I’d discover that I was a bit cranky, too.

I am diligently following processes professor Pat Pattison recommends online and in his book Writing Better Lyrics, optional reading material I am finding quite necessary. There are steps a lyricist can take to discover ideas, word combinations, and effective story telling. For me, some of it straightforward (object writing), some tedious (exploring the thesaurus, identifying rhymes), and some quite difficult (finding an effective angle, avoiding cliches, finding metaphors).

All of this creates great sympathy to my middle school and high school piano and composition students, and it has offered me some opportunity to reflect upon what it takes to learn a new skill.